January 4, 2023- Success within the healthcare supply chain industry means efficiently developing, manufacturing and distributing medical and surgical products to ensure that providers have the products needed for delivering optimal patient care. As the pandemic showed, staying connected across the dynamic healthcare supply chain network is fraught with challenges.
The healthcare supply chain faces numerous challenges including a lack of visibility, inefficiencies, and continuous, but hard to predict disruptions. There is also a lack of real-time visibility to consumption and forecasting between trading partners within the industry, according to Concordance. This is due to a lack of solutions that can connect disparate systems and identify aspects of the supply chain such as variability of supply, inventory strategies, and unpredictable consumption rates. This causes an inability to truly forecast supply needs.
In 2022, Concordance commissioned a market assessment to validate the need and found that hospitals and health systems are very interested in a platform that centralizes all aspects of their organization’s supply chain, while simultaneously bringing insights from their trading partners throughout the supply chain to proactively signal and address challenges such as supply constraints. “The lack of comprehensive third-party solutions and offerings in the industry was highlighted by COVID-19,” Concordance Healthcare officials said. “The same market assessment stressed the supplier and distributor interest in inventory and allocation management, and efficient customer demand planning and forecasting, especially in a solution that is fully connected to providers.”
Read More in the latest issue of Repertoire Magazine.